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Wednesday, March 14, 2012

claptrap in Chappaqua

During these same years, elementary staff had been working with Columbia University Teachers College to implement reading and writing workshop, while middle school mathematics teachers were working with Lucy West, national mathematics consultant, on implementing accountable talk as they moved toward introducing students to rich, authentic problems along with their standard math curriculum.Striving for Improvement Through a Strategic Question: Our Story

I think this is the most pretentious public school document I've seen to date.

[pause]

It gets better.

Our parent community began learning about our focus through presentations at Board meetings, including topics like action research presentations, and through parent workshops designed to keep parents informed about the new math program, Investigations, and our new elementary report card.

Chappaqua teachers, who currently earn an average of $110K (around $130K when you add pensions), are doing beaucoup action research in a new initiative they call "Teacher Action Research Program" or TARP.

Seriously. They created a taxpayer-funded boondoggle, and they named it TARP.

I think *rich* is indeed the operative word here. Do you seriously think an inner-city school would try something like this? Everyone is justifiably concerned about the deficits that poor kids have, but wealthy ones (sometimes very, very wealthy ones) can end up with pretty serious deficits of their own -- primarily because everyone is so fixated on allowing them to "investigate" and "discover" rather than actually learn something.

The best I could figure out from their web site is that they offer Glencoe Pre-Algebra and McDougal Littel Algebra 1 in the middle schools, and in the high school, they offer AP calculus BC. The parents and kids who know what's important will do well, thereby making it possible for many educators (so inclined) to ramble on (and get big bucks) with documents like this. They seriously need a parent/tutor survey.

"98% of the Class of 2011 went on to higher education; 96% to four-year colleges"

"Another new initiative is the Teacher Action Research Project. The project will be a professional development option which allows teachers to use their own classrooms for research and examine their own practices."

There is reality and then there is TARP. I don't think you will see the AP Calculus track teachers signing up for this. Unfortunately, there is nothing forcing reality into lower school math curricula.

"Our parent community began learning about our focus through presentations at Board meetings, including topics like action research presentations, and through parent workshops designed to keep parents informed about the new math program, Investigations, and our new elementary report card."

They decided and then told parents. I remember one of those meetings at our school about MathLand.

Go to their web site, link to "Classroom Clips", and look at the fifth grade video on Investigations. It's filled with the usual talk of problem solving and critical thinking. The teacher believes that it helps kids "have a more authentic number sense". There is no discussion about the details of skills and what level is required or ensured.

http://www.chappaqua.k12.ny.us/teaching.cfm?subpage=1137376

Then, look at the video clip on orchestra in 4th grade. Fourth grade! They talk about the same ideas of critical thinking and problem solving. However, everyone knows that it's the private lesson teacher who does all of the hard work on skills and setting high expectations. It dawned on me that this is what schools want. They want others to do the dirty work of ensuring skills so that they can work on the fun, creative things.

In the music world, there is MENC, which is an organization of school music educators. This is what most students see with competitions like All-State and All-Eastern. However, there are also other organizations, like MTNA, consisting of private lesson and studio teachers. They are the one's ensuring the basic (and more) skills that the schools take for granted. They have their own state, division, and national competitions. It is very competitive, and there is nothing rote about their playing.

It is an annoyance to many private lesson teachers when kids get selected for All-State and the school teachers get all of the recognition. This changed for our state's Solo & Ensemble Honors Concert (sponsored by our state division of MENC), where they now list the private lesson teachers on the program. That's because the pieces they play were mastered outside of school.

The big thing about music is that you can't fake it at the basic skills level. You can go on and on about critical thinking and interpretation, but if you can't play a scale or if your tone is bad, everyone knows. Somehow, this connection between skills and high level thinking doesn't exist for things like math. They think that skills can't possibly form the basis for understanding.

*Do you seriously think an inner-city school would try something like this?*

Uh yeah. I was supposed to teach it. If you looked very closely through the entire 90 minute lesson script, you could tell where what most people would call the lesson was -- but it was pretty hidden and slated for about 3-5 minutes.

10-15 minutes before that was spent in "discovery" -- usually with manipulatives (5th grade). So after an unrelated (but scripted! and not corrected) warm-up (5 minutes), they worked in groups and "discovered" something they hadn't learned about yet. Theoretically.

Then they discussed their discovering using "accountable talk" -- the teacher was provided questions (and the likely - haha - answers). Then they opened their book and you quickly went over the explanatory bar of steps at the top of the page (this is the "lesson" you might recognize). Then you did one problem (maybe two) with them before you assigned a batch of problems (10-15 minutes or so) and walked around the room absolutely not reteaching, teaching, explaining, re-explaining or anything like that. Just "noticing" and taking notes. Having them "struggle with the material." [Urban inner city children don't really respond well to not being taught something and then told to do work with no help, or so I found. I imagine a lot of kids wouldn't like it.]

THEN, for about 10-15 minutes, you went over the two or three problems they told you to go over (pre-chosen, so not necessarily what needed to be gone over), starting with the "simpler or incorrect answers" using student work (and their own explanations) and had them discuss. Then another more complex/correct solution was shown, and then the "best" answer. So, three levels for each question.

Imagine the excitement in the room for the kids who already had gotten it to listen to the almost right and not really getting it answers. Imagine the thrills for the kids who didn't quite get it and had to listen to three - six of their classmates explain in their own words their own ways of doing things. Then you did a quick "understanding check."

Then there was another 20-30 minutes for "DI." Which was mostly paper and pencil games, or playing "Top It" (still. In 5th grade.) If everyone got organized and settled quickly, the teacher was to work with a couple of small groups.

Oh - and those understanding checks? There was no room or time in the script for review or reteaching (not entirely true, every ten days most schools had one "extra" 45 minute time period as long as the mandated project could be done on time. Except in certain schools, which didn't have that extra time, which is why it wasn't given a script.

Ed talked to a middle school teacher in NYC who said the Lucy Calkins program was a nightmare. Teachers were required to have all their students peer-editing each other's papers when they couldn't write, couldn't read well, and couldn't peer edit, either.

She said teachers were basically forced to set up classrooms of essentially illiterate children siting together 'critiquing' each other's papers, which they couldn't really read, let alone critique.

It was a district written (very top down) curriculum "combining" the EDM they were no longer using and the enVision series (and a lot of their related worksheets), held together with lots of discussion and accountable talk.

It was a huge mishmash of things. High expectations meant we'll move quickly, it seemed. But there was often equal time (one class) given to a big, important concept that might have needed 3 days as to topics that were more peripheral and could have been covered in less time (or gasp, not at all, if it meant they learned the important stuff).

Jen, what did you think of enVision when you taught from it? They use it at my local elementary school, and it didn't impress me (for one thing, their curriculum appears to fail SteveH's "are kids still practicing math facts in fifth grade" test), but I'd be interested in a teacher's perspective.

Lucy West . . . that name is familiar. Yes! Kimberly Swygert had a post when West resigned from District 2 in Manhattan, where she was director of mathematicshttp://www.kimberlyswygert.com/archives/002214.html Swygert quoted from NYCHOLD: "West has no math background and lacks the credentials to teach math in NYS higher than grade 6. She received a BS in counseling and theatre from Empire State College in 1984; and an MS in elementary education from Bank Street."